In the studio with Jeanine Durning

Jeanine Durning is an Alpert Award winning choreographer and performer from New York whose work has been described by The New Yorker as having both “the potential for philosophical revelation and theatrical disaster.”

If you would like to read more about Jeanine Durning’s piece, Last Shelter, click here.

Start before you’re ready. Go. Just go. 

Wildly joyful and challenging was our process with Jeanine. An uncomfortable battle to find comfort in our decisions. Not letting a familiarity or repetitiveness settle in. Allowing the mind to travel for the body to respond. 

It is not a composition. We move through the knowledge our body holds and find precision, clarity, our body thinking for itself. 

How do we move on from the weight of what we’re doing? The non-stopping is always there and carries on… I didn’t hesitate, but at what point do I make the decision and when does that become hesitation? 

It is bold and brave, there are no rough edges. “Between here and there is myself”, it’s that simple. 

This is a felt experience, a felt knowledge. Trying to find the eye of the storm where my body is deciding for me because I can only go at the rate at which I am noticing. 

We are always doing it together.

Anastasia Sheldon, Apprentice Dancer

Thinking about Jeanine’s practices and scores, reading back over some notes from the creative process about a score called ‘objects game’ where we pick up and place down objects in a group in a spontaneous unplanned score – how to get inside and ground it enough to read what’s occurring on the inside within it, whilst letting the decision making process rest in the somehow in the body – some things she said are

‘Get deeper inside the game, be patient, try not to get ahead of yourself’

‘I’m not going to avoid that, it’s right here, it’s right in front of me, what I do with it is another story, it’s there to be used, it’s right in front of you. Sometimes I see like, oh.. What do I do with it? Just.. just do it! And then yeah, that doesn’t last so long. It’s like incremental you know, and it’s like you’re on to the next thing!..

Ben Ash, Company Dancer